Aidnography

Hi all, This is actually blog post #502 ! Wow…and it’s actually still one of the fun parts of the work week :) This week features a lot of international organizations-and mostly it’s not good news… But my quote of the week comes from Clelia O. Rodríguez and it addresses many issues both in #globaldev and #highered: The corridors of the hallways in the institution where I currently work embodies this faux-solidarity in posters about conferences, colloquiums, and trips in the Global South or about the Global South that cost an arm and a leg. As long as you have money to pay for your airfare, hotel, meals and transportation, you too could add two lines in the CV and speak about the new social movement and their radical strategies to dismantle the system. You too can participate in academic dialogues about poverty and labor rights as you pass by an undocumented cleaner who will make your bed while you go to the main conference room to talk about her struggles. Development news: The debate...

Hi all, A long week comes to a summery, sunny conclusion!    Development news: Once more: Does aid work?! Media & democracy in Afghanistan; Cameroon’s ‘auntie army’; do women in Latin America get empowered by microfinance? Traveling in Uganda; the trouble with medical voluntourism; RCTs-it’s complicated; One Belt, One Road & questions of economic empowerment; private security & inequality; how UNDP Eurasia communicates; C4D for vaccination; Read-of-the-week: my poor mother wasn’t trash.    Our digital lives: Switching the lens on service & serving; the ideas industry.    Publications: Management in a neoliberal world; live poor, die young.    Academia: Why haven’t MOOCs replaced professors? Flipping the classroom the right way. Enjoy! New from aidnography Revolution and Authoritarianism in North Africa (book review) There were a couple of reasons why I selected Frédéric Volpi’s book for review. First, Volpi is lookin...

One of the topics that certainly makes a mark on this year’s academic research, public engagement and publishing trends is the critical engagement with new social movements, forms of protest and so-called revolutions-and how to predict, analyze and contextualize their impact on social change. Paolo Gerbaudo’s book , but also recently published monographs by David Karpf and Zeynep Tufekci are some of the key titles on my ‘read & review’ shelf right now.  Even though all of them deserve a nuanced analysis some of the key findings point in a similar direction: ‘We’ were too quick to talk about social media revolutions. Movements need to combine online and traditional protest strategies for longer-term impact. Short-term activism and activities may not lead to medium-term sustainable, inclusive change. Building or fostering democratic, accountable systems is…complicated. And traditional social, political and economic structures are surprisingly (?) resilient as hashtags tren...

Hi all, It's a sunny Friday afternoon in Sweden! Enjoy stimulating readings, great documentaries, a poem & the odd Tweet! Development news: UN’s new top humanitarian is a highly qualified white British man; revolutionizing mindsets at the WHO; ICC turns 15; how Liberian child soldiers fought in Iraq; refugee real estate in Kenya; are the best days for selling cheap Chinese goods in Africa over? An overview over one of our favorite questions: Does foreign aid work? Uganda & the limits of entrepreneurism; the aid industry’s LGBTIQ blind spot; is localization of aid the answer? A special section on campaigning & communicating development; social media in Africa; how to communicate as a non-profit; NGO-Nothing Going On?    Our digital lives: A poem; advice for new bloggers; review ‘Twitter & Tear Gas’.  Publications: World Bank’s Higher Education for Development evaluation; gender differences in scientific collaboration (a paper written by 5 men…); secu...